OF SIX MEDIÆVAL WOMEN
in the habit of the Order strewn with the arms of Artois. Jean Aloul, of Tournai, has been suggested as the sculptor, since it is known from the accounts that he was working for the Countess at Arras in 1323. This statue (known to us through a drawing, now at Brussels, made in 1602) is of interest to-day because, judging from the character expressed in the face, it seems probable that it was a portrait, and not simply imagery. This conjecture seems all the more likely when we compare the statue with a miniature painted more than a hundred years later by Jean Fouquet in Les Grandes Chroniques de France (Bib. Nat.), portraying the marriage of King Charles the Fourth with his second wife, Marie de Luxembourg. In this picture a lady, heavily coiffed, and with features suggestive of those of the statue, but with anguish written upon them, turns away from the ceremony as if it were all too painful. If this unwilling guest represents Mahaut, her woeful look is intelligible when we recall the sad story connected with Charles's first wife, Mahaut's daughter Blanche, married when she was but fifteen, and whose beauty was so dazzling that Froissart records that "she was one of the most beautiful women in the world." Accused of an intrigue with a gentleman of the Court, she was imprisoned in the Château-Gaillard, where she remained, with shorn head, until, shortly after Charles ascended the throne, the Pope declared the marriage null. Then, whilst the, king wedded another, the sad
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